The Elephant Sitting on Our Faces Since March, PART I
(9 min read)
It’s Sunday morning as I’m writing this. My partner is playing the organ, mother of all instruments, at an Episcopalian church service. I’m on the couch, the 2007 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie playing on the big screen, my six-year-old next to me, thoughtfully crunching on popcorn and interrupting me for the third time with a question about the turtles’ parentage: “The fox is their dad,” he says, “but who is their mom?” I weakly protest that I do not believe the fox is their father, but I’m so desperate to concentrate I don’t push the matter. Then popcorn spills. The cat gets excited. Me less so. After the cleanup is taken care of and beverage needs are seen to—“No, you can’t fill your entire water bottle with orange juice!”—we’re settling back down. Our agreement was he’d get to watch a movie on the big screen (a rare occurrence these days), if he’d let me work in peace. So I’m blasting this lovely album through high-tech noise cancelling headphones while gore and mayhem ensue on screen. I am determined not to break my streak of actually publishing a post every Sunday—this will be the fourth—so if I must resort to descriptions of mundane home-life realities, so be it. [“Mom, can I have those M&Ms now? You promised!”] Life. Love him so much.
So I think I have arrived at the point where I’ll attempt to begin addressing the gargantuan elephant sitting on our faces since March of 2020. It is no easy task, and especially not a straightforward one. I’ve resolved to begin in a way that might seem abstract and removed from the everyday experiences we’re living through, but much reading, reflection, and observation have lead me to believe it is the only focus that has a chance of truly mattering.
[We’re at the scene in the movie where a cook is assaulted by a red creature—some combination between Stitch (from Lilo & Stitch) and Giger’s Alien—in the restaurant’s kitchen freezer, and I’m momentarily distracted. But Raphael’s got it covered. Though my son informs me he is currently “bad,” so I’m confused. But intrigued, cause the two brothers are now arguing about “vigilante nonsense,” which relates to what I’m wanting to write about. Christ it’s hard to stay focused around kids . . . Starbucks to the rescue!]
Without going into the causes, let us begin by acknowledging the effects: Initially, most of us were shocked. Or, rather, experienced a very real sense of alarm. Something unusually “bad” was unfolding, rapidly, and it was neither clear nor easy to predict just how extreme the consequences were going to be.
My own mind went to dystopian visions quickly: lockdowns, supply-chain disruptions, local militias taking over, people forming savage factions, mobs ruling supreme. I’ve had nightmares of our current “civilization” unraveling since early childhood, so the announcements of “stay at home” measures, “travel restrictions,” and “store closures,” pushed some deep-seated panic buttons. I was scheduled to move to Nashville at the end of May, but ended up moving two months earlier, to prevent the possibility of being indefinitely separated from my fiancee. A movie that stunningly captures how quickly contemporary society could revert to barbaric realities is Blindness. As the film portrays in gut-wrenching clarity, when established and sophisticated methods of allocation and distribution of essential goods and services are wrecked, the organizing principle that quickly asserts itself is sheer might: brute force and violence.
Fast forward to September. We are no longer shocked or alarmed, at least not acutely. If you want (but why would you?) a quick recap on what we are told were the most important events between just January 1 and July 4, 2020 scan through this list (or this heavily illustrated one by CNN through June 30th). We have gotten used to “working from home” or “working while masked,” or not working at all, avoiding of “gatherings,” “virtual learning” (I have to suppress much just typing that), and a newly normal daily, nay hourly, rhythm of horrifying, outrage provoking news. We’ve gone through several cycles of self-adjusting, re-calibrating, taking stock newly, and re-settling according to the ever-moving goal posts of the “new normal.” I assume many of us have gone through at least one if not many of the following phases, at different times, to different degrees:
researching COVID-specific news, studies, statistics, in-depth reporting, scientific accounts, etc.
Consuming more mainstream news than ever.
Consuming less mainstream news than ever.
Consuming more NON-mainstream content than ever, including going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes.
Dismissing most of it.
Accepting more of it than ever.
Feeling disoriented and de-motivated. Disengaging from media, including social media, entirely.
Something new happens (usually involving death: of a celebrity, of a supreme court justice, of a person with melanated skin, of a person with a badge, of a person who was strongly identified with one side or another) and so we . . .
. . . repeat steps 1 through 8, this time about the new subject.
I know many people skip Steps 4. through 6. but if you’re reading this, chances are you don’t. Either way, I don’t think it changes how we end up feeling: stuck somewhere along the journey of a downward spiraling roller coaster whose loops include shock, outrage, fear, confusion, grief, despair, anger, sadness, hope, and despondency. We bemoan, we attack, we defend, we assert with righteous indignation, and we grieve to the depths of despair. Then we mostly settle, it seems, into an ever hardening cast of selective indifference. You can’t be outraged at everything all the time. So we narrow our lenses. We may focus on just what’s in front of us, or on one issue only, or on a limited selection of them, to whatever degree our life situation allows, or we avoid focusing altogether and simply numb out. Distraction reigns supreme.
Never mind the gradual, cumulative effects: the strain on nerves, the burden on parents, and the pressure on adult children caring for parents. The pressure to perform at work as if this were normal, the tensions of disagreements—on issues that have been made to feel existential: “You’re playing with people’s LIVES!”—the stress of uncertainty, the aching for community, for family, for friends, for connection, for togetherness. The economics of it all. And the politics. Oh the politics.
Amidst all this, I feel like something strange is happening for many people in our culture at large. While some are digging in their heels harder than ever into long-held beliefs, faiths, and theories, for others some glue that used to hold it all together has come undone. Something has come unhinged, and those of us who are experiencing this can sense that no amount of “getting back to normal” will make things fit back the way they were. It’s like the techtonic plates of our most fundamental assumptions have come de-coupled, and we can tell we’re newly detached and afloat . . . drifting into unchartered territory.
For one thing, the rate of change in the landscape of our common reference points has accelerated exponentially: ever more people know more things about fewer topics, but know more people than every before who know the exact same few things about these few topics . . . while there are ever fewer people who know at least some things about many issues, those who still do, find it harder than ever to connect to others like themselves, because grouping such people together provides absolutely no benefit to the gods of Capitalist Algorithms. Quite the contrary.
Also, and more insidiously, the very language we’ve taken for granted—assumed to be a common and impartial fabric facilitating exchanges about “objectively” experienced realities—is coming undone: systematically unraveled and laced with ideologically charged tripwire at every turn. I’ve never felt as unsure and nervous about saying something about anything to anyone as I do today.
As a result, when you aim to express That Which Is True in a way that allows as many people as possible to hear and absorb it, you now have to contend with two constraints: Speak only from personal experience, and elevate your viewpoint above whatever the respective topic’s apparent binary divide. Also, you have to be self-aware to an unprecedented degree about the true intent behind your communication. Whatever it happens to be, you have to own it, consciously. How often do we find ourselves in a diatribe that we think is designed to enlighten another, when all we’re actually doing is voicing dismay? Expressing anger? Doing the grown-up equivalent of a baby’s wailing because we’re, quite simply, upset?
My personal experience is this: I have irretrievably lost faith in mainstream narratives, whose hold on me had been tenuous for quite some time. I am an educated, white, gay, resident-alien woman living in an urban environment, so naturally I preferred the liberal media. I used to watch Rachel Maddow on a daily basis. I relate to her as a human being, have met her, have read both her books, and think she’s wonderful. I used to adore Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (Trevor is great too, but those are big shoes to fill. I read Trevor’s book and highly recommend it). Stephen Colbert (The Late Show) is a deeply cultured human being. I admire what he is able to do and I watched him, too, every night, for years. I still would, under different personal circumstances.
Wanting to live up to the impartiality of a true philosopher I would sometimes watch shows on Fox News as well. Bill O’Reilly back in the day, then Hannity and Laura Ingraham. This was always a painful exercise. I’d feel insulted as a media consumer, as a person, and as an intellectual. It’s not possible to be emotionally invested in the narrative of one side and not negatively react to the narrative of the other. Anyone who’d argue that MSNBC was just the Left’s equivalent to the Right’s Fox News made me angry. “That’s a false dichotomy,” I would say. “They are educated on the left, and education means commitment to the Truth, dammit!” Right? People who pay lip-service to critical thinking and align with institutions of Higher Learning must have our best interest at heart! Right?!
Minimizing my exposure to MSM (Main Stream Media)—not just the “news” but also mainstream movies, social media, and public radio, etc.—has brought into startling relief just how much it doesn’t just inadvertently “affect” and “influence” our thoughts—therefore feelings, therefore lives—but how it is specifically designed to do only that. Not just to “sway” us one way or another: thinking the media merely “sways” us in a certain direction still assumes there are a set of “objectively” agreed upon events that are, in fact, happening, to which our reactions are then being manipulated. But things are way more extreme than that. And way more complex, and also more fascinating.
The very notion that there are certain “events” that deserve our attention over and above others is in need of deconstruction. Things are “events” when they have some sort of an impact that is considered significant to the affected stakeholders, right? Based on what is deemed “significant” in that way, certain places, times, people, and entities are then selected as contexts worthy of monitoring for potentially meaningful “events.”
For example, millions upon millions of people meet with each other and talk every single day, but when one man we collectively agree is a “U.S. president” meets with another man we collectively agree is “the supreme leader of North Korea,” and if they meet in front of cameras, at an agreed upon place and time, then this marks a major world event. It, literally, “make history.” But what, and of what significance to whom, has actually happened? And, most importantly, is there a real distinction to be made between the “event” itself and “the media coverage” of the event? How are the two different?
I’m not talking “deep-state shadow government” conspiracy theories here. I mean this purely from a “let’s look at this phenomenon from a detached point of view” perspective: the nature of what’s happening between “reality” and media, the structure of it, its constituent parts, and the way media of every kind has become pervasive in all aspects of our lives means we have arrived at a point where we’ve abdicated our capacity for determining a reality that is distinct and separate from the “events” and “happenings” as “covered”/“conjured” by the media.
[Continued in Part II . . .]
